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This paper aims to provide deeper insights into the relationship between board gender diversity (BGD) and accounting conservatism by exploring the mediating role of corporate social responsibility (CSR) underlying this relationship.

The authors sample 10,252 firm-year observations from 932 publicly listed firms in 15 European countries over the 2010–2020 period. The authors conduct several models for panel data, applying mediation mechanisms, the Heckman two-stage model and the generalized method of moments and instrumental variable regressions to test the research hypotheses and account for endogeneity problems as well as unobservable heterogeneity.

Based on an integrated theoretical framework that draws insights from agency, resource dependence and stakeholder theories, the authors establish a positive and significant relationship between BGD and accounting conservatism, which is significantly mediated by CSR. The authors provide empirical evidence for the prior inconsistent results on the gender diversity-conservative accounting link and suggest that BGD promotes effective corporate governance and enhances CSR performance, which in turn, leads to higher conservatism in financial reporting.

The findings have important implications for regulators, policymakers and managers in understanding the drivers to ensure and control the quality of financial reporting. The results alert firms to the need to focus not only on the importance of BGD but also on CSR activities to ensure higher earnings reporting quality.

The results are significant in encouraging a higher presence of women on corporate boards, enhancing CSR performance and drawing social attention to mitigating earnings management practices through higher conservatism in financial reporting.

This paper recognized a gap in the literature not yet examined and contributed to the body of knowledge through the mediating role of CSR in the relationship between gender diversity and accounting conservatism.

This paper aims to examine the role of technological capability in the relationship between corporate governance and small and medium-sized enterprise (SME) performance.

Using panel data comprising 1,357 European SMEs from 2014 to 2020, this paper examines how technological capability acts as a mediator and moderator within the governance-performance nexus.

The results show a positive and significant link between corporate governance mechanisms and SME performance, as well as between technological capability and SME performance. In addition, this paper show that technological capability plays a crucial role in moderating and mediating the governance-performance relationship. Specifically, technological capability accentuates the positive effects of board size, the presence of outside directors and concentrated ownership on SME performance. Conversely, it attenuates the positive impacts of CEO duality and board gender diversity on SME performance. These results highlight corporate governance mechanisms and technological capability’s crucial role in significantly influencing SME performance.

The results suggest that SMEs should prioritize not only the implementation of effective corporate governance mechanisms but also the strategic utilization of technological innovations to boost performance. European policymakers are encouraged to enact supportive policies on technological innovation to strengthen the governance-performance dynamic.

This study contributes to the governance-performance literature by offering new insights into the critical role of technological capability, which has been previously explored in partial and fragmented ways.

This paper examines the moderating role of capital structure decisions in the relationship between research and development (R&D) investment and small and medium enterprises (SMEs) performance.

Based on panel data of 1,357 European SMEs from 2014 to 2020, this study employs a generalized method of moments (GMM) regression to examine the R&D-performance link through the moderating role of capital structure.

The results show that R&D investment and equity financing positively and significantly influence SMEs performance. Debt financing, however, is negatively and significantly associated with SME performance. In addition, we show that capital structure choice significantly moderates the relationship between R&D investment and SME performance. Specifically, debt financing attenuates the positive impact of R&D investment on SMEs performance, whereas equity financing accentuates this relationship.

This study helps policymakers formulate appropriate policies to overcome the challenges of underinvestment in R&D projects to enhance SMEs performance.

Our findings provide new evidence on R&D-performance literature by refining the deeper understanding of the role of capital structure, which has previously been examined in partial and fragmented ways.

This study aims to explore the moderating role of board gender diversity (BGD) in the relationship between corporate governance mechanisms (i.e. board size, board independence, chief executive officer (CEO) gender, CEO duality and ownership concentration) and firm risk-taking.

Using a sample of 192 non-financial publicly traded Italian firms over 2014–2018, this study tests the proposed research hypotheses and assess the moderating effect of BGD.

Drawing on agency theory and resource dependence theory, this study finds a significant relationship between corporate governance mechanisms and firm risk-taking, which is significantly moderated by BGD. BGD accentuates the negative effect of board size, independent directors, CEO gender and CEO duality on firm systematic risk and attenuates the positive impact of CEO duality on firm unsystematic risk. The results, which are consistent with the risk-reduction effect of BGD, are robust to the use of alternative measures of firm risk-taking.

Women’s presence on corporate boards plays a critical role in the board’s involvement in risk-taking. Hence, investors and stakeholders should consider women on corporate boards as a crucial risk-mitigating factor.

This paper contributes to our knowledge on risk management by demonstrating the moderating role of BGD while relating corporate governance mechanisms and firm risk-taking.

The purpose of this paper is to examine the role of accounting in the enactment of the Napoleonic imperial project in Tuscany and the Kingdom of Naples in the early nineteenth century.

The study adopts the Foucauldian theoretical framework of governmentality and a comparative approach to highlight similarities and differences between the two regions.

The presence of different cultural understandings and structures of power meant that in Tuscany accounting mirrored and reinforced the existing power structure, whereas in the Kingdom of Naples accounting practices were constitutive of power relations and acted as a compensatory mechanism. In the Kingdom of Naples, where local elites had been traditionally involved in ruling municipalities, control of accounting information and the use of resources “re-adjusted” the balance of power in favour of the French whilst letting local population believe that Napoleon was respectful of local customs.

The ability of accounting technologies to act as compensatory mechanisms within governmentality systems paves the way to further investigations about the relationships between accounting and other governmentality technologies as well as the adjustment mechanisms leading to accounting resilience in different contexts.

By identifying accounting as an adaptive instrument supporting less obvious practices of domination the study helps unmask a hidden mechanism underlying attempts to know, govern and control populations which still characterises modern forms of imperialism.

The comparative perspective leads to a new specification of the multifaceted roles that accounting plays in different cultural and political contexts in the achievement of the same set of imperial goals and enhances understanding of the translation of politics, rhetoric and power into a set of administrative tasks and calculative practices.

Narrative is believed to be a crucial component of sense-making in organizations, and previous research in the field suggests that multiple levels and forms of narrative are inherent to the definition of professional identities (Clarke et al., 2009; Ybema et al., 2009; Brown and Lewis, 2011). For example, narrative can be found in the stories told by organizational actors as they informally interact in the workplace, in the formalized basic assumptions that support organizational strategy-making, in the accounts people give of their work, and in the artifacts they produced and experienced while engaged in accomplishing tasks. The purpose of this paper is to consider narrative as a way of giving sense to organizational membership, of constituting an overall and possibly shared sense of direction, of focussing one’s professional identity, and of enabling and/or constraining the ongoing activities of actors. The context of the research was given by a group of sport federations enrolled within the Italian National Olympic Committee (CONI), which is the national most authoritative network of professional local sport organizations.

Participants involved in the study were 42 professional referees belonging to this network and active in different sport disciplines and 12 people from the CONI management. In-depth narrative interviews were collected in the aim to investigate the narrative cues revealing the organizational sense-making processes that animate the representation of this professional identity both at a subjective and at an organizational level. Data have been explored adopting the semiotic square and diatextual analysis as to highlight the strict relationship between text, context and interlocutors.

Data have been explored adopting the semiotic square and diatextual analysis as to highlight the strict relationship between text, context and interlocutors. Results showed that there was an evident gap between what the management formally defined as strategic vision, mission and cultural guidelines that actually shape the organizational identity of the CONI and what was concretely experienced by its actors, in this case the referees.

Most of the studies conducted in sport organizations focussed either on an intra-organizational level investigating the specific features of given professional categories such as athletes and/or coaches, or at an inter-organizational level, paying attention mostly to the marketing and networking strategies oriented toward stakeholders. On the other hand, most studies conducted on referees have devoted attention strictly to performance assessment, that, in line with a positivist approach, considered the latter as an output of situational and psychological variables (e.g. Marie, 1999; MacMahon et al., 2007). Conversely, the findings coming from the present study contributed to support the promotion of an alternative organizational approach, more specifically based on the strategic relevance of horizontal (within the federations) and vertical (between the federations and the center of the network) communication as to enhance the identification process which give sense to the organizational basic assumptions.